


Scars Revisited

by irrelevant



Series: imperfect construct [3]
Category: Batman Beyond, Batman: The Animated Series, DCU, DCU Animated
Genre: Action, Episode Related, Future Fic, Gen, Gen Fic, batfamily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:31:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things change.  Except when they don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars Revisited

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alcyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcyone/gifts).



> Animated continuity only, BTAS tie-in.
> 
> Alcyone, I really hope this works for you.

23.26.45  
“False alarm,” Terry said as soon as the car cleared the roof. “Not even close to a B&E.”

“Disappointed?” Bruce’s voice spoke in his ear.

“No—well, kind of. Slow night.”

“Slow nights are good nights. Was it animal incursion?” Bruce asked.

Although he knew Bruce couldn’t see him Terry reflexively shook his head. “Couple of chem heads looking for a quiet place to drop. They picked the wrong building. I pulled them out of the HAE net, told them to get lost.”

“Animal incursion.”

He started to roll his eyes and stopped. Bruce had just upgraded the suit and there were still a few bugs in the design. Like the one where Terry's corneas had almost fused with his new cowl’s lenses the first time he'd rolled his eyes while wearing it. Caution was the smarter part of valor, especially when it meant not maiming himself.

“City’s quiet tonight,” he said, changing the subject to something less dangerous to his eyes. “Too quiet.”

Somehow, the old man’s voice always sounded dryer over the comm. “How long have you been saving that one?”

A smirk would have been wasted. He checked his readouts instead. The warehouse district _was_ quiet, and nearly deserted. Aside from a few unlucky loaders stuck on nightshift, nothing was moving. No movement anywhere there shouldn't be movement meant no reason for him to stick around. He throttled back, taking the car up away from the Tricorner docks towards Midtown.

“It’s the truth," he said, answering the question Bruce hadn't asked. "Jokerz activity’s way down. No word on the Ts at all, and the packs are staying indoors. N figures they don’t like the cold. Says there's not going to be enough action for two of us plus the cops until the crazies come out on New Years.”

“Is that why she grounded herself?”

A corner of the aft screens showed the seat behind his, empty. It was a new addition to the car, kind of like the person who usually sat in it.

Okay, not new, exactly. It had taken half a year of intensive PT before Bruce had let Max out on restricted patrol with Terry, much less at all. A year before regular patrol, and forget giving her her own piece of the city.

Not that Terry had been any more enthusiastic about her determination to hit the streets in tights, but it still took the old man forever to give her the go-ahead. Figured, though, that once she was on his official duty roster he’d assume Gotham owned all her free time.

Give it up for Bruce In-my-head-I’m-Batman Wayne. This guy doesn’t just give new meaning to obsessive-compulsive, he redefines it.

Terry forgot to stop his eye-roll in time. He said, “Ow.”

Bruce snorted.

Terry throttled down, idling the car while he waited for his eyes to produce enough fluid to unstick themselves. “You designed this torture chamber. A little sympathy wouldn’t kill you.”

“At my age you can’t be too careful,” Bruce said. “Nightwing?”

“One track mind much?” He blinked once in relief, then took the corner of a hundred story scraper faster than he should have because one, the car could handle it, two, he felt like it, and three, Bruce would always hate that Terry was out here taking the corner instead of him, which made up for a lot.

“N’s in Blüdhaven,” he told Bruce. “Some kind of training exercise. She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

And that was it. That’s all he was getting. As usual.

At least his eyes were back to normal, or close enough that he didn’t have any trouble pinpointing the flashing light on the GPS outlay.

“WayneTech,” Bruce said. “Strange. The security update went live three hours ago.”

“Guess you’re about due,” Terry replied as he turned the car around. “It’s been, what, two months since someone with a grudge went after one of your little side projects?”

“Cute.”

He laughed and leveled the car out, steering clear of the high rise gauntlet waiting to tear open his chassis. Spread below him, Gotham scraped the sky, broad arrogant towers of plasglass, alloy and polymer that seemed to get broader and higher every year.

He’d have said more arrogant, too, but kicking anything remotely connected to the name Powers out of Wayne Tower had dropped the snob factor down about a thousand percent, in addition to putting the old man in a good mood.

Sort of a good mood. Less cranky than normal, anyway.

“Be careful. The timing indicates an inside job.”

“Always am,” Terry said. “And I’ll let you know as soon as they do. Ever notice how the bad guys always need to tell you how smart they are?”

Bruce made a noise that was probably, in some other dimension, a laugh. Terry gave the engine some power.

The car shot forward.

  


23.33.13  
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said three minutes later.

“Possible,” Bruce replied, “but I doubt it.”

“Magic, time travel, Lazarus pits, yeah. I know. Just turn on your vid link. This guy is—”

Standing on the top ledge of the WayneTech building, holding a small metal security box in one hand and waving at Terry with the other.

Wearing a suit that looked like Terry’s without the bat ears.

Grinning.

Terry said, “Tell me I don’t look like that when I smile.”

“Only somewhat.”

“You can stop with the silent laughter now,” said Terry. “Also, remind me to never smile again. Right after I kick this guy’s butt. Any idea what’s in the box?”

“An AI master cell.”

He reminded himself that like rolling his eyes, too much blinking was not a good idea. “Master cell?”

“The intelligent part of artificial intelligence.”

“So, its brain.”

“Not really, but close enough for conceptual purposes.”

Terry watched the guy on the ledge lean forward to peer down two hundred and something stories. He looked like he was actually considering it. “Is this where you tell me this project in the wrong hands would be very bad?”

“Yes.”

“Great,” Terry sighed. “Another one. Whoa, there he goes.” The guy had just thrown himself out into the air like a professional diver.

Terry had already disconnected his harness. He thumbed the hatch closure and stood up. “Later, gotta go chase the bad guy,” he said, and dove.

  


23.34.53  
“McGinnis, wait,” Bruce said. He wasn’t surprised when nothing but static answered him. Something was interfering with the comm line, and it wasn’t Terry.

Bracing his hands on the console, Bruce leaned heavily, shifting some of his weight off his bad hip as he frowned at the image frozen on the monitor.

The suit was full coverage unmarked black; not much of the body inside it was available for identification, not unless you counted body type, which he did. But there was something—

“Go to grid,” he said, and the screen partitioned off into quantifiable pieces. “Section ten thirteen, rotate thirty-twenty-five, enlarge and enhance.”

It was there, but still too faint for certainty. “Enhance magnification thirty percent.” Certainty grew along with the enhancement.

Raised black insignia on black background, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Almost.

It was like him. He never stopped being a showman, even when he had only himself to show off for.

Bruce's hip twinged, sharp new pain briefly masking an old inner ache that never truly went away. He shifted his weight again, more out of habit than expectation of relief. Three surgeries and one replacement, and he could still hear the shatter-crack of impact after Harvey cut the rope.

On very cold days he felt it.

It was a very cold day in December. The cave was very damp.

Bruce turned away from the console and began the process of easing himself into the chair. He’d just identified what he thought might be the least uncomfortable position for his hip when the first blast door slammed shut.

He'd run this kind of situation in simulation many times, always different sequences. This time, the door behind the clock went first, immediately followed by the secondary elevator entrance.

The main entrance was the last to go. Even the echoes sounded final.

The cave was sealed off, as it would be during an emergency situation or a simulated exercise.

The simulation, if it was one, wasn't his. That left the emergency.

The sector four proximity alarm started blinking.

On the monitor, the frozen image winked out, row after row of code replacing it. The bright blue lines quickly ran out of screen room and began scrolling.

Bruce finished settling himself. He watched for a brief time before reaching for the touchpad on the console. He stopped after several fruitless tries. The system was locked up tight.

Leaning back in his chair, he propped his elbows on the armrests and steepled his fingers. Ace sat up and put his paw on the armrest near Bruce’s elbow.

“Settle down, boy,” Bruce said. “We’re not taking extreme measures yet.”

“Hrruff!” Ace retorted, but he lay back down, settling his muzzle on his paws. His ears stayed pricked.

Bruce glanced at the uncooperative console. In a moment he’d get on with getting his cave back under his control. After he figured out why he’d lost control of it in the first place.

Code scrolled endlessly blue down the black screen. The sector four proximity alarm died, and the sector one alarm went off.

Ace growled low in his throat.

Bruce reached down, smoothing the hair rising on the back of his dog’s neck while his mind added another possible theory to the reject pile.

“You could have called,” Bruce informed the monitor.

But he hadn’t, and Bruce had taken his cue from him. Not one of their finer moments.

“Why are you doing this?” The cave threw his voice back at him, the echo twisting the sound of his words, giving him a different question instead of answers.

What are you doing?

  


23.34.59  
Fifty-seven point seven miles an hour, still free-falling and picking up speed fast according to the suit. He was dropping like a stone and hoping he’d see twenty.

The guy below him? Was doing aerial somersaults.

He was good.

Scary good.

Better-than-Terry good.

He was also about to be road kill if he didn’t pull up, and Terry didn’t think he’d get there in time to grab him. Even if he did get there, there’d just be twice as much road kill.

On the tail end of that thought, the guy flipped around and gave Terry a thumbs-up. His wings engaged and his thrusters fired, keeping him from impacting a busy overpass and giving any birds of prey that might be hanging around enough food for a week.

Terry turned his screaming dive into a hair-pin turn and narrowly missed doing a great bug/windshield impression against the nearest building. Panting, he clung to a window ledge and looked down at the guy perched on one of the overpass lights.

“Okay,” he said. “This twip is seriously getting on my nerves. He’s also seriously good. Suggestions?”

The comm stayed silent.

Terry tapped it. He said “Bruce?”, but without much hope. The line wasn’t just silent, it was dead.

“Great,” Terry said, and looked back down. The guy was still there, squatting on his street light like a—

“Really not going there,” Terry muttered. He touched the impression on his belt that activated his tracer and the car’s autopilot. He didn’t think he was going to be able to chase this guy without it.

Maybe fifteen seconds later he was still waiting, which was weird. He’d left the car right overhead…

Terry raised his head and focused his lenses. The car wasn’t where he’d left it. It wasn’t anywhere.

Feeling like one of those head-bobbing dolls in the backs of cars, Terry looked down again. The guy was grinning at him. Again.

He didn’t punch a hole in the wall of the building supporting him. It was hard, but he managed because he was Batman and Batman did harder stuff all the time, no problem.

He spent a lot of time not punching holes in walls. Sometimes he went whole days without causing property damage or breaking the law at all.

True, he’d never been that good at following rules, which had landed him in big steaming piles more than a few times.

Then there was the vigilante thing: lots of law-bending and breaking going on there.

He believed in grey areas; he also believed in moral absolutes that needed to be upheld, but too often weren’t. He believed those absolutes took precedence over some of the rights and wrongs defined by law, which was one of the reasons he wore the cowl.

He didn't enjoy the law-breaking parts of moonlighting in the suit. He wasn’t looking to cause trouble for anyone who didn’t have it coming. He obeyed the law when he could and tried to operate under the radar when he couldn’t. He tried not to shove Batman’s cowl in the commissioner’s face too often.

Stuff like that he had no problem with.

Rules—rules were different from the law you got in a courtroom. They were for school or home or, jeeze, things like etiquette. And yeah, he pretty much sucked categorically at those.

On the other hand, there were a few basic, unspoken rules that every guy understood and followed. Kind of a silent pact of schway versus unschway. Don’t ask another guy’s date to dance, don’t insult his mother, and don’t mess with his ride. Straightforward rules. Rules to live by.

Terry’s ride hadn’t just been messed with, it was gone.

Suit guy grinned up from his streetlight. Then he stood up, waved once, and flipped backward into freefall.

“It is _on_ ,” Terry said, and went after him.

  


23.42.24  
The worm was doing what it had been made to do, multiplying and then dividing, wreaking havoc on the cave’s controls systems.

He’d gotten the console working again, but he hadn’t been able to find the root problem. The worm was a hydra: cut one head off and twenty others sprang up to replace it.

If he could find the origin he’d have a better chance of stopping the program, but the source could have been any number of things. An incoming data stream, a comm message, even a corrupted net link.

Considering the resourceful mind behind the source, almost anything was possible.

Her mark was all over the cave’s systems, her hack signature as distinctive and obvious as a hand print smeared through thick dust.

Bruce tried the comm link again. Still dead.

He found fresh spoor within a growing collection of false trails and started backtracking. The lead died as the rest had, choked in tangled lines of code.

Bruce straightened out of an increasingly cramped position and glanced down at the floor. He hadn’t gotten any comments from the peanut gallery in a while, which was unusual.

“Ace?”

No response. He swiveled the chair around and knelt painfully down on hard stone.

Ace was lying as he had been for most of the evening, chin on his crossed paws. His ears had relaxed; there was a slump to his back that hadn’t been there earlier.

Bruce brushed a hand over his dog’s fur. His fingers dislodged something that rolled down Ace’s flank and hit the floor with a faint click. He retrieved the small dart and looked up into the shadows.

He’d known she’d show up at some point, but with the sensor array in disarray it was impossible to know for certain how long she’d actually been in the cave.

Bruce touched his fingers to Ace’s chest, just behind the joint of his foreleg. The pulse there was steady. Normal. Ace wouldn’t be out long.

He set the dart down on the floor and rose to his feet in slow, aching stages.

I’m getting too old for this.

Something on the console was blinking; probably another proximity alarm. Bruce ignored it and went to shut off the power.

  


23.49.48  
It ended faster than it had started.

One second the guy was hovering maybe ten feet away from Terry, giving him a curled-finger come-on. The next he’d pulled the cell container out, tossed it at Terry and shot straight up.

Terry dove unthinking after the box. Cold sweat poured down his spine, his thrusters fired, and his cupped hands missed. The box tumbled past him with the greatest of ease.

Twisting desperately, he grabbed, and this time his fingers connected. He didn’t actually get it, just batted it back toward himself, catching it on the bounce when it tried to escape. Fingers wrapped tight around his prize, he pulled himself around, extended his wings and turned his dive into a glide.

It got him to the closest solid support – an apartment building. He landed gracelessly on somebody’s balcony, got his feet under him and looked up.

His partner in crime had followed him down. Suit guy was two stories up on the building opposite Terry’s, crouched on an almost nonexistent ledge.

His teeth were bright white against his suit’s total blackout. Smiling, he raised his hand in a mocking salute before standing and spreading his arms. Wings like pieces of a kite grew out from his arms and torso. His thrusters ignited.

Confused as hell, Terry watched him go. He didn’t see the point of following: he already had the box, and he’d just end up losing him—the guy was that good.

He wished he knew why he’d gotten the box back so easily. What was the point of taking it if the guy was only going to give it up?

Frowning, Terry went back over the last few minutes.

There’d been no sign of surrender. The guy had stopped taunting him, dropped the box and taken off, almost like he’d gotten some kind of abort signal.

A signal like the one that had killed Terry's comm. Suit guy must have a partner, like Terry had Bruce. Like Terry normally had Bruce, anyway. Whoever had taken out the comm knew their stuff, and knew…

And knew Terry had somebody he was in contact with.

He was getting there, Terry thought. He didn’t have Bruce’s enormous, sneaky brain or Max’s tech savvy, but he wasn’t dumb, either. So what did he know?

He knew someone had the technological knowledge and materials to construct a suit a lot like his own.

He knew the guy wearing the suit had been playing with him. Distracting him?

He put a mental question mark next to that and tried to identify what it was about the other suit that was bugging him so much. There was something nagging at the back of his mind, but every time he tried to pin it down he got a picture of himself suited up with his arms spread in gliding formation.

Frustrated, he closed his eyes, pictured the other suit and got… nothing. Big fat zip. There was nothing off or out of place about it. The basic design was a match for his aside from the ears and—

“Slag it!”

Those stupid kite wings. Not like his, but really close to Max’s. An exact match for the ones on the suit that came before hers.

Acrobatics from hell. Retro wings. That freaky smile.

“I’m a twip,” Terry told the box. He tightened his hand around it and ignited his thrusters.

He didn’t go far, just to the roof of the closest scraper. It was older than most and had some fancy stonework on it. There were even a few gargoyles scattered around. Terry crouched down next to one and turned the box over in his hands.

He was holding the what, and the who was pretty obvious. Now he just had figure out…

His head jerked up. He stared across the tops of the surrounding scrapers toward Gotham County proper. “Oh my god, Bruce.”

He was pretty sure he knew what was going on, but he wasn’t staking the old man’s life on pretty sure. He’d guessed wrong before.

Pushing up out of his crouch, he sent the signal that should have called the car. And then he remembered.

After saying a bunch of things that would have gotten his butt kicked by both his mom and Bruce if they’d been around to hear any of them, he tucked the box into his belt and blasted off. He just had to hope there was enough juice left in the power cells to get him back to the manor.

  


23.56.04  
Bruce knew as soon as the backup generators came on that he’d given her exactly what she wanted.

Not the kryptonite. That would have been stupid as well as dangerous, and while all of them embraced the latter to a degree, the former described none of them.

The cache was the only plausible goal.

There were approximately fifteen yards between the breakers and the palm pad. Every dragging step of the distance was an insult; he was breathing harder when he got there than he used to after a run-in with an entire street gang. He felt his jaw clench as he bypassed the useless scanner and entered the code, and then the thick door slid back and Max was grinning sheepishly at him from the other side of the doorway. “Hey, boss. Funny meeting you here.”

Bruce focused on her face, ignoring the backlit objects behind her. “Come out of there,” he said, and she sprang forward like a released grapple, darting quickly past him.

He closed the door, reset both the password and the DNA scanner, and turned around.

Her suit was caked with mud in places, but he didn't need to see it clean to know it wasn’t the one he'd made for her. The armoring on it was better than anything they’d had in his day, but otherwise it was an exact replica of Dick’s original Nightwing design, with none of the new suits’ advantages.

“You can reset the power connections,” she said. “The systems restore should have kicked in by now.”

Bruce didn’t respond. He didn’t move. He was looking at her hands.

They were holding Robin’s belt.

  


00.00.09  
The boss was staring at her, eyes narrowed, his mouth getting flatter and tighter the longer he stared. She’d almost decided he was trying to make her brain melt out of her ears with the amazing power of _his_ brain (and also that it was working) when he turned on his heel and limped back around to the power breakers.

Max heaved a silent sigh of relief. As soon as his back was to her she lifted the belt, stretching it out to its full length.

It was surprisingly heavy compared to the equipment she was used to working with. And beautiful in a way her own belt wasn’t. Cautiously, using the tip of her gauntlet, she pressed a catch on one of the compartments and peered inside.

Some kind of pellets. Ice, or maybe smoke. She could almost see Dick throwing them at Riddler or Poison Ivy or Joker, scattering bad jokes along with the smoke screen. Smiling, she carefully closed the pocket back up.

She’d been pretty freaked by this op at first. Aside from the obvious detractors (Bruce, Terry, cave, _duh_ ), there were a bunch of random factors she hadn’t liked. “What if it’s not where you think it is?” she’d asked.

Dick had been bent over the holo platform controls, but he’d raised his head at that to smile at her. “It’s there, all right,” he said. “Right here.” He pointed to an enclosed space off to the left of the Case.

“Isn’t that where he keeps the kryptonite?” she said.

Dick shook his head. “That’s right behind the Case. This one’s next to it," he said, and his smile got really... sharp. Pointy. Something nobody who wasn't nuts, and sometimes not even then, wanted to mess with.

She liked to think of it as his Bruce look. They all had some version of it.

“It’s a sort of shrine to Bruce’s self-perceived failures, I guess you could say," Dick had continued. "Everything he can’t deal with, he shoves in there.”

Compared to the entirety of the cave, the room was miniscule. “But he never forgets.”

“No.”

As if he realized how wrong single, curt syllables sounded coming out of his mouth, Dick started talking, rattling off data almost too fast for her to assimilate it.

“After the backup generators kick in you’ll have maybe twenty seconds before Bruce comes back. The DNA scanner will be off, and you can open the door with the touchpad."

Max looked at the holo. It took up the whole platform. Even scaled down, the cave was immense and immensely intimidating. "Let me get this straight," she said. "While you're out flying around having fun messing with Terry's mind, I'm going to shred the sensor array, slag the entire system, invade through an entrance that is going to be all kinds of unschway if it even _exists_ , incapacitate an innocent animal-"

"He's Bruce's dog," he interrupted. Using the edge of the platform, he flipped into a handstand and grinned at her upside down. "How innocent can he be?"

She glared at him. " _Incapacitate an innocent animal_ then keep out of Bruce's way _without_ the cloak until he gets annoyed enough to shut everything down. After that I've got less than half a minute to get in and out before I'm dead. And if I don't get out, I shut the door and hope Bruce isn't as smart as I know he is."

He tumbled off the platform into a perfect finish. "That's a pretty fair estimate. Except for the part where he's even smarter. There'll be backup security set to activate with the generators, and you won't have time to use a scrambler."

Max moaned and fell backward onto the couch, covering her eyes with her arm.

Dick laughed. "I've got you covered, kid. The code used to be nine one nine three nine, but if it’s not, it'll be six ten forty-seven or twenty-two seven nineteen.”

She lifted her arm. “Why those?”

“Twenty-two is eleven times two. My birthday is November eleventh. Tim’s is July nineteenth.”

Oh. “And the other one?”

Dick pressed something on the control panel. The holo died in a flicker of blue light. “June twenty-sixth, ten forty-seven pm. Think about it.”

She didn’t have to. If she couldn’t figure that one out, she didn’t deserve to wear the suit.

“And if it’s not there at all?” she asked after an uncomfortable couple of moments had dragged by. “If he burned it, or whatever he does with old equipment?”

He’d laughed again then, some wrong chord running through the perfect thread of sound. “Bruce, throw that away? After I made a point of leaving the uniform out for him to find? Uh-uh.” The smile he gave her was crooked and beautiful. “I made my point, and he lives every day of his life in the past. He’s probably got the uniform in there to go with the belt.”

He’d been right about that. Creepiest part of the whole set up, and considering the Case, that was saying something.

The suits in the Case were different. She didn't know how to explain it, not in a way that would sound logical.

They _felt_ different. Impersonal, maybe. Creepy, sure, but the reasons for them made cave sense, if not daylight sense, at least to someone who'd worn one.

Dick's Robin uniform was hidden where only Bruce would see it, singular and private. It made no sense except for somewhere in Bruce's brain.

She didn't want to think about possible reasons other than the one Dick had given her. She didn't want to think about the reasons for the other stuff clustered around the suit, either, but she'd never had much luck shutting her brain up.

She’d tried not to see anything else while she was in there, but shrouded shapes had pulled at the verges of her mind and the corners of her eyes, suggesting things she was sure she’d eventually see fully formed in her nightmares. Thankfully Bruce had been all over her too fast for her to do much besides grab the belt.

The sound of the cave powering back up pulled her out of a mindspace she was glad to leave. Almost immediately the comm on the main console bleeped, and Bruce’s cane and footsteps moved in that direction.

Max slung the belt over her shoulder and trailed after him. If it was Terry, she wanted to get the initial screaming over with. She was probably going to need new earholes tomorrow.

But when she got close enough to see, the face on the screen was Commissioner Gordon’s.

“Gibson,” the commissioner said, transferring her glare from Bruce to Max. “Are my people allowed back out on their normal beats yet, or is your pain in the neck partner still raising hell?”

Max glanced at Bruce, but his jaw was doing that tic-tic-tic thing it did sometimes. Her comm was silent.

She was on her own.

Squaring her shoulders, she faced the screen. “Yes, sir,” she said. “The op was completed and he’s on his way home.”

“Thank god for that. The last thing I need is him running amok in my town more than he already has.” Her mouth was kind of twitching as she said it. Max wasn’t too worried.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”

The twitch turned into a real, surprisingly gorgeous smile. “Nice work, kid. Gordon out.”

Max stared blankly at the blank screen.

Commissioner Gordon had just said something nice to her. It was kind of…

Actually, it was freakier than getting snarled at. She was so weirded out she jumped a little when Dick’s voice spoke suddenly in her ear.

“You did good, kiddo,” he said into the comm, echoing the commissioner in a much less creepy way. “Next time we’ll work on getting you out before you get caught.”

The heck with Bruce. If Dick was standing in front of her now, she’d hug the stuffing out of him. “We kicked. Their. Asses, woo!”

His voice was warm with laughter and approval. “We sure did.”

Resisting the urge to shriek like a stupid gamer groupie, Max hefted the belt. “So, you want your property back, boss man?”

She could feel Bruce watching her, waiting like she was waiting. She didn’t think they were waiting for the same thing.

“Nah,” Dick finally said. “It’s yours. Your decision, Nightwing.”

Max closed her eyes. Nobody but her cat had seen her cry since her parents split up (except for Terry, once, which didn't count). Bruce wasn’t anywhere near the short list.

“Top of the transit center building,” Dick said. “Tomorrow, twenty-one hundred.”

Swallowing the wadded up crepe clogging her throat she said, “Got a lead?”

“Nope,” he said, the laugh back in his voice. “You’re going to learn how to ride the trains, which means you wear what you've got on now, not one of Bruce's toys. See you there, kid. Break a leg.”

“Wait, what? Learn how to what?” she said, but the line had gone dead. Robin’s belt dangled limply from her hand as she turned to Bruce.

“The trains?” he said.

 _Ears like a bat_ was just a figure of speech. Uh-huh. “How’d you know?”

“I know Dick.” His eyes bored into her, hollowing her out for whatever he decided to put back in. “I also know the auxiliary cave entrance is still sealed. How did you get in?”

And now they were at the part she _really_ wasn’t looking forward to. “I used the other entrance.”

Maybe it was the shadows, hanging around him like one of his old capes. Whatever, his shoulders looked twice as big as normal. “There is no other entrance.”

Max took a deep breath and held tight to Robin’s belt. “Boss… there is.” She made herself meet his eyes, _what do you think he's gonna do to you, twip?_ Which was kind of stupid because then she had to make herself not think about all the things he _could_ do. Make herself say, “You know there is.”

Sometimes Terry’s eyes reminded her of Bruce’s. And then she'd screw up and Bruce would look at her the way he was looking at her now and she'd wonder, like she was wondering now, what the heck she'd been thinking.

Terry’s eyes didn’t burn you and freeze you and empty you out, all at the same time; they couldn’t.

“The old sewer system,” Bruce said. He sounded like he was tasting the idea with his brain.

Ew.

Max thought she might be losing it, just a little. She _knew_ she was nodding too much and too fast, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“I sealed it up years ago. There’s only one other person alive who knows about it,” he said evenly.

“Yeah,” she said. Her heart was doing a really good job of hammering itself out of her chest. “He remembers.”

The brain melting trick might be bogus, but it sure didn’t feel that way. Max closed her eyes and prayed for it to be over quickly.

She heard Bruce shifting, the click of his cane coming closer…

“Apparently I need to have a word with Kent,” Bruce said. And then Ace whined.

Max’s eyes popped back open. She dropped the belt and dove for Ace. “Ow, ow, ow,” the floor tried to kneecap her, but the suit kept her from damaging anything too badly. She settled beside him, stripped off her scuzzy gauntlets -- the old Gotham sewers had been drained and dried out, but it was winter and they were still old sewers -- and started checking him over.

Stroking one hand down his side to find his pulse, she supported his muzzle with the other. The dazed, unfocused look in his eyes broke her heart.

“God, baby, I’m so sorry. Never again, promise.” He licked her hand, and she thought at Dick, not ever, and rubbed his ears. “I should feel bad for cheating on Amadeus with a dog, but you’re the best dog ever. Yes you are.”

“Who’s Amadeus?” Bruce said from behind her.

“An extremely jealous and demanding cat.” She craned her neck to look at him, her hands full of Ace. “I’m really sorry, Bruce. I should have found some other way.”

He was standing off to her left, leaning on his cane. He’d draped Robin’s belt over his forearm. “The sedative was the least painful choice. The dosage was correct.”

She should have been offended by the slight surprise in his voice, and later she would be. Right now, she was too relieved to care.

Ace whined again, nudging her knee with his nose, and she turned back to him, helped him lay his head on her leg.

Bruce’s cane clicked closer. Something swung in Max’s peripheral vision; she looked up at the belt, held above her in Bruce’s hand. “Your decision,” he said, Dick’s words in the wrong voice.

Max reached up. The belt dropped into her palm, heavy and welcome.

She liked the weight of it, the solid heft of history made real and hers. She didn’t know yet what she was going to do with it, but it was her choice. She had time and a cave in which to make it.

At least, she thought she had a cave, although if the pounding and shaking didn’t stop, that could change.

Bruce had turned his head and was frowning in the direction of the stairs. He glanced down at her, his eyebrows sardonic parentheticals of doom.

“We're about to have company,” he said, just as Terry shouted, “Bruce, are you down there? Are you okay? Bruce!” Pound, pound, pound. “Gibson, you are so dead!”

Bruce arched one of his scary eyebrows at her. _Doooom._

She shrugged helplessly, her lap still full of dog. “Pneumatic lockdown has to be reversed manually. Sorry.”

Terry pounded again. “Max! If you don’t open this I’m breaking it down and then Bruce will kill both of us!”

“I’d say sorry doesn’t cover it, but I think you’re going to be a lot sorrier very soon,” Bruce replied, and went to let Terry in.

  


00.45.03  
Bats chittered and rustled, made restless by the unusual amount of activity within the cave that had once been and would someday again be solely theirs. Jostled free, one dropped, spiraling lazily down to the floor.

Ace lifted his head. His ears pricked, but the bat straightened its trajectory at the last moment, spread its wings and swooped past.

The faint wind of its going stirred the air around Bruce; its farewell shriek blended eerily with the human voices moving away from him toward the level two showers.

“—well you know what? The heck with Batman needing a Robin. I scored the belt, therefore the corresponding minion should be mine.”

“Max, Nightwing used to _be_ Robin.”

“Excuse me? Nightwing, standing right here, never was a Robin, never gonna be a Robin.”

“Give me a break.”

“Where do you want it?”

Bruce tilted his head back and looked up to where the most restless patch of shadow seethed. There was nothing visible but bats and stone.

“Satisfied?” Bruce said.

The cloak deactivated, leaving Dick hanging from the ceiling like the bat he'd never truly been. “Are you?” he asked.

Bruce’s mouth wanted to curve up. He was good at denying wants, his and everyone else’s. “Never,” he said.

“Exactly,” Dick said, and dropped.

How Dick got from point a to point b was still, after so many years, a mystery to Bruce. Dick would be standing or sitting or just existing in a certain space, and then something unbearably beautiful would happen and Dick would be somewhere else.

He’d been on the ceiling with the bats. Now he was crouched on the floor and Bruce’s eyes were stinging.

Ace barked once, joyfully, and bounced over to Dick like a pup newly sprung from a dark, dank kennel.

“Traitor,” Bruce muttered.

“Nah.” Dick rumpled Ace’s ears. “He’s just got good taste.” He glanced at Bruce. “Most of the time.”

“Where is my car?”

" _Your_ car?" After one last stroke down Ace’s flank, Dick curled fluidly to his feet. He stripped off his cowl and ran his hand through his short, still mostly dark hair. “It's under my place. Max can bring the kid by tomorrow to pick it up.”

“Yes,” Bruce said. He said, “Dick.”

Dick folded his arms and raised both eyebrows. “Bruce.”

He’d never liked feeling at a loss, and he was good at arranging things so he almost never was. Dick had always been a large part of almost. “The belt is yours,” Bruce said. “You only had to-”

“I know,” Dick cut him off. “Look, the point of the exercise was the infiltration of a high-security compound without the suit for back up. The retrieval mattered, not the belt.”

“The belt was her objective, as dictated by you.”

Dick looked away. “It’s the only thing I knew for sure you had in there. I wasn’t about to send her after the damn kryptonite. Not without the suit.”

“She didn’t need the suit. She had you,” Bruce retorted.

Dick’s grin flickered on and off like a dying light filament. “This was her first shot. We’ll work on extraction next time.” On, off. Off, on.

Lights out.

“I don’t expect you to agree with me on this,” Dick said, “but people learn better when they’ve got backup they can count on.”

Some unlucky acoustic chose that moment to throw Max’s voice at them. “Nightwing and Robin! Sounds good to me.”

Her words dropped into their shared silence, plummeting like dead birds. They hit hard, without grace or ease. Bruce tightened his hand around his cane and let them lie where they landed.

Dick was looking at him, his head cocked to one side. The smile was back on. As Bruce watched, it flared briefly into the brilliance Bruce hadn’t seen in decades, and then Dick threw his head back and laughed loud enough to startle a few more bats into flight.

Bruce had no choice but to wait out the cacophony.

The screeching had died down and his laughter was fading into echo when Dick said, “She’s right. It sounds good.”

Bruce closed his lips over arguments neither of them would win. They tasted cold, dead as ash in his mouth, but Dick was smiling again. Without the brilliance of earlier days, yes, but also without the mockery that came later.

“I’m not going to ask you to forgive yourself,” he said. “I don’t believe in miracles. But you could try cutting yourself some slack once in a while. For variety’s sake.” The smile widened into a grin, and then Dick pulled the cowl back on, obliterating all expression. “See you around, old man.”

“Who are you calling old?” Bruce said, but he was speaking to empty space.

He didn’t see or hear Dick’s exit: he expected nothing less. Nor did he expect or want meaningless pleasantries; not from anyone, but especially not from him.

Dick’s smile was already fading Cheshire-like into the fold of memory. The cave’s shadows held his laughter, wrapped in echo.

Bruce listened until he couldn’t differentiate between Dick’s laughter and Max’s or Terry’s. They were coming back up from below, pushing and sniping at each other. Playing the same way—

They came to him instead of using the elevator or going up the stairs. Max folded herself down cross-legged on the cold floor next to Ace, who forgave her the dart and put his head in her lap as soon as she started rubbing his ears.

Terry stopped beside the evidence table. He looked for a long moment at the belt, then he lifted the cell container, holding it up. “Think you can put this back without them freaking?”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. Terry rolled his eyes. “Yeah, dumb question.” Yawning, he set the box back down and propped his hip against the table. “I’m slagged. We done here or what?”

“You are,” Bruce replied. He looked at Max. “Others are not.”

She grinned up at him, unrepentant. Possibly impertinent as well. “Forget it. I’m not staying down here all night and I hate to break it to you, boss, but you aren’t either,” she said. “Come to the dark side, also known as upstairs where there is reliable climate control: we have cookies from Terry’s mom, and there’s a late-late monster movie marathon on the net. You’re not going to make Ace miss _The Blob_ , are you?”

Bruce looked at Ace, who perked his ears and gave a questioning whine. He looked back up at Max and Terry. They were watching him, waiting for his decision.

No. Not his decision. Waiting for him.

He was already holding his cane. All he had to do was stand up, _all_ being a misleading word when applied to an octogenarian with a bad hip and a trick heart.

Terry pushed away from the table and walked over to stand in front of Bruce. He looked down at Bruce, his mouth quirked to one side, and then he held out his hand.

“I suppose the database can wait,” Bruce said, and took it.

Max was on her feet, standing with Ace at the foot of the stairs. She smirked at Bruce when he paused beside her. “You’re the boss, boss,” she said.

He could give her back her smart words. Could say something foolish and foreign and ultimately forgettable.

_You’re not wrong._

_Try to remember that the next time you break into my cave._

_Don't forget it._

Too close, and too many years away, Tim’s laughter was real and unashamed, living inside the same echoes that held Dick’s.

Bruce handed Terry his cane.

Max’s shoulder felt strange under his hand in a way the sleek back of Ace's neck didn't. His fingers slid a little on the slick surface of her shirt. His other fingers sank into Ace's fur. The skin underneath fabric and fur was equally warm to his old, chilled touch.

Equally alive.

He took the first stair step, and they took it with him.

They took him the rest of the way home.


End file.
